Fighting Dems

If you have not yet checked out Air America's Fighting Dems, do yourself a favor. It's a joint project of Majority Report and DailyKos that airs every Tuesday night, profiling Democratic veterans who are taking another step in public service by running for office.

This is Bryan Lentz, running for Congress in Pennsylvania's seventh district (suburban Philadelphia) against Republican Curt Weldon. Lentz, a Major in the U.S. Army, served in Iraq and oversaw civil reconstruction efforts around Mosul. Understandably, he has a great deal to say on the subject of Iraq, troop withdrawal, the administration's failure to plan, and other related topics. Here he is on reconstruction efforts:

We need to remove reconstruction command authority from civilians and place it directly in the hands of the military; and, we need to transfer as many of the reconstruction contracts as possible directly to Iraqi firms. Not one cent of the remaining taxpayer money that we sent to rebuild Iraq should go into the pockets of American firms profiting from this war. The American and multinational companies that are currently handling reconstruction in Iraq have all been awarded "cost-plus" contracts which assure them a profit and leave them no economic incentive to actually finish the jobs they've been hired to undertake. As a result, enormous sums of money have been diverted to security services for American contractors, and generous salaries for American businessmen working in Iraq.

I have witnessed this madness first hand, and it has to stop.

He notes that Republicans will continue to brand anyone questioning the war effort as anti-war, anti-troop, anti-American and calls this tactic "a cheap trick." Best quote:

[T]his is not a question of being "pro-war" or "anti-war." It's about acting now to stop the spiral of failure that George Bush, Curt Weldon and the Republican party have created.

They will try, but I doubt even the GOP can smear Lentz as unAmerican.